Remove the single quotes.
The angle brackets are not special in a regex neither are the double quotes, so there's not need to escape them.
if ( $line =~ m/<island id="\d{8}">(.*)<\/island>/ ) {
$line = $1;
}
OMG-OMG, FishMonger - that WORKS! I was trying other forms of assignment for the $1 and kept getting 'uninitialized' errors, but in trying to initialize then got errors saying I couldn't do it.
THANK YOU VERY, VERY MUCH FOR YOUR PATIENT HELP !!!
-stuckinarut